The UK is experimenting with a 4-day workday, why is BAT still addicted to 996?

Work for four days, take three days off, and keep the salary the same.

In early June, 70 companies in more than 30 industries in the UK, with a total of about 3,300 employees, began an "anti-involution" experiment. It was the largest short-week pilot event ever, with everyone from company managers to ordinary workers focused on the end result.

In China, the Internet manufacturers still prevail in overtime culture, and the news of "overtime sudden death" occurs from time to time. Although since last year, many companies have declared that they will no longer be "996" or "big and small weeks", but the atmosphere of overtime has not really eased.

When will the wind of "anti-inner roll" blow up in China?

The 4-day work system, also known as the 100:80:100 model, requires employees to get 100% of the salary, must use 80% of the time to achieve 100% of the work results, the core is to change the length of time as the management center, to the efficiency of the work mode.

This change runs through the development of capitalism.

Britain is the birthplace of modern capitalism, and the big factories we take for granted today were born in England with the first industrial revolution and changed the world's form of labor organization.

Marx said that capitalism has brought unprecedented progress in the productive forces, and the price behind the progress is the hardship and blood and tears of the workers. Along with the factory, it was super long hours of work and labor. At that time, British factories were labor-intensive, low wages, and extremely poor working conditions, and workers generally worked from 10 to 16 hours a day, usually 6 days a week.

The capitalists of that time tended to extend the working hours of the workers to obtain more surplus value. After all, in the case of constant labor efficiency, the length of working hours is directly related to the results of work. This ethos also spread throughout the Western world. According to statistics, in 1890, full-time employees in American manufacturing plants worked an average of 100 hours a week.

The improvement of the situation comes from the continuous strikes and protests of workers, as well as from the changes in factory management and production methods.

In 1914, Ford announced that it would reduce the daily working hours from 9 hours to 8 hours and raise the daily salary from $2.34 to $5. The corporate world awaited Ford's bankruptcy, but the latter achieved a net profit of up to $30 million in 1914. Moreover, from 1908 to 1916, the price of the Model T fell from $850 all the way to $360, but its net profit margin was still as high as 300%.

Behind this is ford's large-scale assembly line production application, which almost perfectly embodies Frederick Taylor's management philosophy, that is, to spin off the entire process of production, find the most economical and efficient "standard operating method", and distribute it to everyone. Taylor stressed that the study of working hours and the analysis of work is definitely not to make workers desperate, but to find a standard quota for a worker's "normal" working hours.

The eight-hour workday was then truly established, and the era entered the era of capital creating value. Hard work is no longer the best way to accumulate wealth and promote production, technological innovation has become the main force to improve production efficiency, and capital accumulation has begun to become a source of value creation.

Britain's confidence

Similar to the industrial revolution more than a hundred years ago, the information revolution has once again changed the productive forces and production relations, and globalization has brought about a new industrial division of labor. Developed countries are more engaged in high-end manufacturing, finance, technology and creativity industries, while developing countries are focusing on ordinary manufacturing and primary raw material processing.

In the new value chain, the UK is undoubtedly in the upstream position, showing a very prominent characteristic of innovation to create value. To promote "innovation," the Taylor system, which treats people as parts of a machine, is no longer applicable.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, is the most famous critic of the Taylor system, arguing that knowledge workers have a strong desire to achieve self-worth, attach greater importance to achievement motivation and spiritual motivation, and they are more inclined to have a relaxed and autonomous working environment, rather than being constrained like workers on the assembly line. Managing knowledge-based talents should focus on stimulating vision and potential.

Silicon Valley, known for its lax management, also had a crazy overtime culture. At that time, workaholics were not only advertised as an ideal way of life, but also had an industrial chain in Silicon Valley that mainly sold success science.

But then Silicon Valley took another approach to inspiring employees to work. Walk into Google and you can even see employees wearing masks and slippers, free lunches, shuttles, gyms, games rooms... Employees enjoy star benefits, overtime is also happy, with benefits to encourage overtime, is also a corporate charm.

Silicon Valley is not a "stupid big money" of landlords, no company is willing to raise idle people, their "indulgence" of employees is to rely on an inclusive culture to manage employees, in order to stimulate employee creativity and improve the overall efficiency of the enterprise.

The growing role of innovation makes it possible to promote an environment for innovation – a more relaxed working atmosphere and more flexible, shorter working hours – and the uk's emergence as a testing ground for the large-scale "four-day workday" is related to the fact that the BRITISH economic structure occupies the high end of the value chain of the global industrial chain division of labor with outstanding innovative and creative capabilities.

The 4-day working day experiment in the UK is also the general trend of the post-epidemic era. After three years of epidemic baptism, the physical and mental health of employees is being valued by more and more companies. Therefore, many European and American companies want to take this opportunity to implement new ways of working and improve employee welfare. Many employees in the UK express strong support for this, believing that the 4-day workday improves physical health, increases time with their families, and increases happiness.

Before the UK, other countries have started similar practices. Iceland's four-day work experiment between 2015 and 2019 was rated as a "great success" by research institutes. Workers who participated in the trial said there was less stress at work, a lower risk of burnout, and improved health and work-life balance. Many companies in Iceland today are working on a 4-day basis.

When will China's big manufacturers abandon the 996?

In 2019, Chinese programmers launched the 996.I CU campaign on Github, the world's largest open source website, to protest the excessive overtime culture of Internet companies, with the initiators writing in English: "Developers' lives matter" on the event page.

The past 20 years have been a glorious history of the rapid development of China's Internet with dividends. The influx of 1 billion new users into the Internet has created the world's largest and most dynamic digital society and brought about the world's largest Internet market. But the golden period of China's Internet development does not rely on core technology and product innovation that dominates in Europe and the United States, but on a strategy dominated by sales or marketing.

In the past 20 years, Internet giants have been focusing on attacking cities and grabbing resources. After a product is launched, whoever can grab the market at the fastest speed can win. At that time, BAT, what to make money to do, fight manpower, but also became one of the magic weapons to grab the market and grab profits.

996 came into being under this opportunity, once helping large manufacturers to seize higher market share faster, and also achieved a leap forward in the Internet dividend period, and a number of famous enterprises made a lot of money.

However, in this wave of wealth distribution, workers are at the low point of distribution. As the gap in the door to wealth freedom becomes narrower and narrower, more and more people are questioning whether hard overtime is really valuable and how much water can be squeezed out of 996. Pretending to be busy is very valuable, and it has become a thick black study in the workplace.

The drawbacks of extensive growth are also becoming more and more obvious. For many years, the big factories have desperately tried to 996 in order to compete for the cake of demographic dividends. But the "resource curse" has always existed: abundant resources may be a curse rather than a blessing for economic development, and if a country is overly dependent on some relatively abundant resource, it will lead to slow or even stagnant growth in the later stages.

It is true that BAT has achieved immediate results many times by relying on 996 and stacking manpower. Recruit a team of people, invest in a new project, and you can go crazy in the market. "Investment without borders" has become the slogan of big manufacturers. However, in recent years, more and more projects have been invested by large factories but returned home, and after the tide of diversification has receded, there are very few fist products that can be left.

With the return of capital to rationality, spending money like dirt has become a thing of the past. The focus of the capital market's investigation of large factories has also changed, from users to profits, forcing large manufacturers to think of making money in a way. At this time, relying only on manpower is not reliable, overtime culture can not continue to bring high profits, many companies began to reflect on whether 996 is effective. Tying up employees to work overtime every day at their workstations may not have been exchanged for an increase in efficiency, but in exchange for public opinion attacks, reputation damage, and more than worth the loss.

Speaking of the 4-day workday, Juliet Shore, an economist and sociologist at Boston College, said: "It doesn't make sense to stick to a rigid, time-based system. "Whether considering labor relations and social image, or to promote the next transformation, big factories must abandon 996 because it has become an obstacle to the future."

Although the domestic 996 wind has not yet withdrawn, there is still a long way to go to completely reverse the overtime culture, but it is the trend of the times to continuously optimize the management model and change the bad habits of management. The good news is that some departments of Tencent have piloted 1 day a week to force 6 o'clock to leave work, and Byte and Kuaishou have also cancelled the size week. It is wise for Chinese Internet companies to be willing to collectively reflect on them and implement them into concrete actions.

Industrial transformation and changes in management concepts complement each other, whether it is the assembly line factories of the past or the silicon valley giants of today, they have experienced such changes. History will not repeat itself, but it will always rhyme, and Chinese companies facing a major transformation also need to consider how to create more incremental value with new management methods.

This article originated from Snow Leopard Finance